Life in the Group Room

March 21, 2014

Lives

By PETER MOUNTFORD

Everyone was always trying to escape the stroke ward, and who could blame them?

John had a solo room and would lie there calling hoarsely, his alarm beeping: “Help me! Someone please help me!” Sometimes I would spot him hovering in his doorway in his aqua hospital pajamas, eyeing the double doors at the end of the hall. When the coast was clear, he shuffled frantically for freedom. I rooted for him, but the nurses always caught up. He would spin around, fists raised. Once, as a nurse ushered him back to his bed, I overheard him say, “You’re very pretty, you should take your clothes off.”

“It doesn’t work that way, John,” she said.

I was in dreary Scotland, 4,500 miles from my kids, halfway through a divorce. I had flown out to sit beside my father for a week. He had a stroke a month earlier and was in a group room. One roommate, a former corporate executive, said that he’d had enough and made for the exit, falling when he was halfway across the room. Thrashing on the floor, he screamed in pain, and I watched, frozen in horror, until the nurses came. A couple of hours later, he did it again. Another roommate brayed in incomprehension on bad days. He often announced he was done, was ready for the pub. Everyone present nodded approvingly.

At a glance, my father seemed almost unaffected by the stroke. But then he strained to remember the word “banana,” or I noticed him carefully scanning his utensils, trying to sort out which was a spoon. One morning, I entered to find that he had written out a Shakespearean sonnet from memory. But the previous day he wasn’t able to read his own name.

This butter’s as hard as a whore’s heart. My father showed me the sentence on his pad, scribbled in recognizable but unsteady script. “Overheard at dinner last night,” he said, with a conspiratorial eyebrow arched. “Excellent dialogue here.”

My father had always been devoutly bookish, so it was especially cruel that he lost his ability to read. An economist by day, he read voraciously and widely, was an avid chess player and an amateur Dante scholar. I gave those traits to the protagonist of my second novel, which I wouldn’t let my father read at first, even though it was dedicated to him. He and the character differ in many ways, but I worried that he would be upset by the similarities.

Last September, five months before the book’s publication, my father visited Seattle, and I confessed that my wife and I were almost certainly divorcing. The following morning, I gave him a copy of the book. The sun was setting when he finished. Sitting opposite him, I asked what he thought. He gazed at me somberly for a moment. At last, he said he thought it was beautiful, powerful. And then he burst into tears.

It was the last novel he read. Within two months he was in that hospital. My father wanted a solo room to be away from the chaos. But nurses rarely came by the solo rooms. And there was the silence. How wonderful to be able to sleep, but what of the relentless stillness during the daylight hours? The choice between solo room and group room felt unexpectedly freighted with meaning to me.

On my final day at the hospital before returning to Seattle, I watched him slowly eat his soggy pasta doused in red sauce. I kept glancing at the clock. It was strangely quiet: One roommate was on oxygen, another asleep. Everyone was peacefully there, everyone but me. “I’ll see you soon,” I said.

He smiled kindly. Though he had lost my wife’s name, he remembered her and knew that I was moving out, that our marriage was over. “You’ll be fine,” I said, although it was obviously untrue. No one was going to be fine.

My sister was getting married the following day at the registry a mile from the hospital. My father’s mobility had improved to the point that he would be able to walk her down the aisle with the help of a cane. Everyone wanted me to stay for the wedding. I knew I should, but I couldn’t stand their questions, their concern. I didn’t need a bedside vigil. So I hurried through the double doors, out into the night, I kept going, I flew halfway across the world, until I made it to the cold vacant house I used to share with my wife and children. Exhilarated, I cranked the heat, swung open the empty refrigerator and gazed at the gleaming shelves, starting to contemplate aloneness, the possibilities.

Peter Mountford is the author of the novels “A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism” and “The Dismal Science,” which was published in February.

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